I cannot wait to read these books to my new students

I am about a week away from my first day of school! I’ve been to school a few times to “work on my room”. It hasn’t gone very well. Pretty much all of the time I have been at school, I’ve just hung out and talked to my colleagues. Not very efficient, but it has been really fun checking in on friends.

Yesterday, before I left to coach a youth football practice, I spent some time looking over my picture books. It is a lot of fun to each year to get a new group of kiddos to share great books with. Much of my time online is talking about the latest and greatest in children’s literature. In my classroom, so many older books are NEW to my students. There is nothing like seeing a kids experience books like Dan Santat’s After the Fall and Sophie Blackall’s Farmhouse for the first time.

In the video below, I share ten picture books that I am dying to share with my new students. Some of them are new, some are old, some weird, and all of them are awesome. I hope you find a book or two in the video to share with the readers you serve.

During the school year I will keep a list of all the books I read aloud to my students. The list will be updated at least once a month. You can find that list here. Currently it only contains the first two books I will read aloud to my fifth graders.

You can find the list of my favorite 2026 books here.

Thank you so much for reading and subscribing to my newsletter. It means the world to me!